Hi everyone. Good news – I already got my coffee, Bad news – the weather outside is shit, and I had an awesome weekend, so being back at work does not contribute to my great mood today.

So brace yourselves while we dissect the main WoW news of the weekend…

First of all, let’s look at the elephant in the room:

Peeps in UK had it too good for a while now (in Blizzard’s eyes), so a sub increase coming your way…. Yes, yes, with a few good will gestures from Blizzard

You can read the full news somewhere else (MMO-Champ somehow comes to mind >.>), but here is basically what I think about sub price increase.

1. It’s logical

Yes, cost of everything is increasing, and obviously reflected in prices for goods over time. That’s normal, I get it.

Howeverrrr….

2. It’s corporate greed

Blizzard is doing well enough as it is, so increasing sub cost EVEN BY A SMALL AMOUNT is a bit of a spit in the face of already declining sub community.

3. It’s done smartly

First of all, they are doing it at the launch of WoD, which is going to be a peak of public interest to WoW in another foreseeable 2 years, so the timing for price increase is perfectly picked.

Secondly here, they are offering a bunch of “good will gesture” deals to existing subbers, which is basically similar to annual pass, but will lock you down for longer – again, I don’t care about their financial details enough to re-post them here.

A lot of kids will buy into it.

4. Most importantly – UK region is only the beginning

It’s practically inevitable that Blizz will roll the price increases out everywhere, in NA and Asia as well.

Does an extra $1 on my monthly price bother me? Nope. Neither does $5, to be honest. If you are being a nice company and providing regular content for me to play.

These are my thoughts anyway.

And if you are one of those who think – “unsub if you don’t like it” – is a valid argument in discussions of matters like this one, you can fuck off back to your primary school right now, thanks.

Tom Chilton on new races:
“I am 100% sure we will do some new races at some point, in some other expansion that is coming up.”

First of all, thanks, Cpt Obvious. New races are coming – SOME DAY – wow, what a revelation! Could you guys have guessed yourself? No, I bet not, right?…

Regarding the wording of “some other expansion coming up” – yeah, I’m sure it is, as your devs locked in a dungeon are already working on it, right? Guess what peeps, they had devs working on WoD before last Blizzcon too, and things were also “coming soon” and “coming up”.

So, thanks for letting us know, Tom, that was helpful.

On Garrisons, the following items were interesting:

Players will be able to target a specific race as their nemesis.

There is also a free for all event that grants access to special armor that you can’t get any other way.

What does the whole “nemesis” thing actually mean? Every NPC of that race becomes hostile? Can this be player races or only e.g. Draenor natives?…

What free-for-all event? Is it between garrisons? Within garrisons? Completely unrelated to garrisons but wrongly reported in this news section?

I guess we’ll see about both soon enough.

“We’re clearly not communicating this well, but if you continue to level an uncommon follower beyond 100 they eventually become rare, and a rare eventually becomes epic.”

No, Blizzard folks, you are not communicating much stuff well, really. But good on you for trying, yep.

Also, that’s good news about followers. What I’d like to understand better is what are the actual benefits and real difference between uncommon and epic followers, for example?

Do they succeed in their missions more often? Bring back more loot?

On us fighting more Orcs and Grommash being the final boss:
Apparently Grommash fight is very different from Garrosh in SoO… And that’s supposed to be making you all feel better right now!

I am shaking my head here, and as always not expecting people to agree with me.

No idea why they thought we are going to be ok with more orcs (and a few ogres thrown in there, to change things up a bit). We are not going to be ok with more orcs, unless the expansion is really short, i.e. more content hits before people torch Blizzard offices.

Kidding.

But really. Grommash will probably turn into a bird or some fking other thing rather than a sha-corrupted huge purple dude. Yep. That’s how the fight will be different. Oh I forgot – and the ads will be ogres, and some demons here and there. You’ll enjoy it guys, pay up!

Pretty much confirmed 4 week duration of Patch 6.0

So I expect it to drop on October 14th now.

Among other things Tom said that they didn’t put much replayability into Molten Core LFR (as opposed to what we hoped for – with repeated runs for ilevel-boosted items, etc), so it looks like that explains why they don’t care much about the very limited time we’ll have access to it.